What’s more important, process or outcome?

Most of us are usually more focused on outcome as an indicator of achievement of goals. However, for teams to work efficiently and productively, following the right process can help ensure the right outcome is achieved with minimal risk, variability, and waste of time. At Brigade, we are known to be a process-oriented organization, many of these being set at a time when documented processes were not the norm

As businesses evolve, regulations change and technology gets cheaper, there is a huge opportunity to radically impact productivity and customer experience by relooking at the processes we follow. We have been working on multiple process changes, with varied goals of customer delight, internal efficiency, savings in time and costs, and scaling up of operations at the organization level.

We have learned that it is key to “challenge the status quo” and relook at how to eliminate redundancies in processes. This is also a great opportunity to break down silos and encourage cross-functional collaboration because a process isn’t typically restricted to a department, but instead touches teams across multiple departments. While there is a lot more to be done, we have made some small and big wins, by keeping customer experience at the centre, making senior management responsible for driving change and convincing their teams of the benefits, right from adopting a new approach to how they approach each task.

One of our biggest wins so far has been the digitisation of the customer agreement process – it has improved the turnaround time to generate and execute agreements, cutting the time taken for the entire cycle by almost 80%, with less manual intervention, better quality control, and reduced time taken by all signatories to complete the document.

Like these, many more such process overhauls are underway. We are expanding the capacity of our technology team as well as dedicating a core group of business team members to identify, streamline and digitise our work, one major process at a time. This hard work will pay off in the near future, but we will continue to reap the benefits of this investment in the years to come.

“One of our biggest wins so far has been the digitisation of the customer agreement process – it has improved the turnaround time to generate and execute agreements, cutting the time taken for the entire cycle by almost 80%. ”

PAVITRA SHANKAR
Executive Director, 
Brigade Group